Attributions
Keith Kozminski, PhD
Team Advisor
Professor Kozminski has offered a guiding hand as our team designed and executed our project. From teaching a preparatory iGEM course in the spring to advising us and helping us overcome the various obstacles that arise over the course of the competition season, Professor Kozminski has become our team’s compass, helping our team stay on track.Jason Papin, PhD
Team Advisor
Along with providing the team with encouragement, Professor Papin has been very helpful in streamlining the modeling. An expert in metabolic cell models, Professor Papin's insight has been instrumental in the course of the development of flux model part of the project.Kay Christopher
Lab Support
With her office directly conjoined with our lab space, Mrs. Christopher was incredible guide for our team as we traversed us through our team's summer WetLab adventure. From helping us set up our lab and summer and fall experimentation to providing us with insight as the team was conducting procedures, Mrs. Christopher's contributions to our team were incredibly useful to the success of our team over the summer and fall.Caity organized and ensured the success of the Virginia Mid-Atlantic Meetup
Wastewater
Tim Castillo was extremely kind to give our team a tour of the Rivanna Wastewater Treatment Plant and gave us deep insight into its operation. He also provided us with a year's worth of monitoring data from RWTP which helped us inform our project, especially the Bioreactor design.
Preparation and Beginning Dates
Our PI, Professor Kozminski, teaches an introductory Synthetic Biology course that all members of the team are required to take. This class meets for three hours every week. Basic synthetic biology concepts were introduced and literature was discussed. Our final project consisted of us teaming up to identify a world issue and then find a synthetic biology solution. We started this class in January when our spring semester began.
We began brainstorming for our project on May 23rd, and we began our lab work on May 24th. We started the Interlab study on June 5th, and we started our project on June 12th.
Acknowledgements
Project Inspiration
Our project was partially inspired by DTU Denmark's 2013 iGEM team.
Wiki Inspiration
Maryland 2016, team page
Virginia 2016, notebook page
Institutions
Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority
Open Biolabs
Sponsors
Vice President of Research, Phillip Parrish
The Lacey Fund
Dean Frederick Epstein
George McArthur
SnapGene
Integrated DNA Technologies
Human Practices Help
Samantha Pagni
Poster
- “Water: sewage treatment plant: tertiary”, Tracey Saxby, Integration and Application Network, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (ian.umces.edu/imagelibrary/)
- “Cylindrospermum sp.” By Matthewjparker - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
- “Dried, anaerobically digested sludge.” By The original uploader was Vortexrealm at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Teratornis using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 2.5
Why is this page needed?
The Attribution requirement helps the judges know what you did yourselves and what you had help with. We don't mind if you get help with difficult or complex techniques, but you must report what work your team did and what work was done by others.
For example, you might choose to work with an animal model during your project. Working with animals requires getting a license and applying far in advance to conduct certain experiments in many countries. This is difficult to achieve during the course of a summer, but much easier if you can work with a postdoc or PI who has the right licenses.